About Me

Monday, September 25, 2017

Last night I watched the sixth episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn
Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward documentary The Viet Nam War, “Things Fall Apart” (after the famous lines William
Butler Yeats wrote about the original fascists, “Things fall apart, the center
cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” which were apparently
quoted by New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a famous anti-war op-ed he
wrote for the New York Times in
November 1967), dealing with the first months of 1968. “Things fell apart” in
that period both in Viet Nam and in the United States: in Viet Nam the North
Viet Namese army and the National Liberation Front (so-called “Viet Cong”)
guerrilla fighters launched a major campaign, the Tet Offensive, which was
intended to seize South Viet Nam’s six major cities (including Saigon, Da Nang
and Hue) and encourage the people of South Viet Nam to rise up and rebel
against the government, demanding reunification of Viet Nam under Communist
rule. The North Viet Namese in general — and in particular Le Duan, the
militant party secretary who ordered the offensive against the advice of his
chief military commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap — were, ironically, making the
same mistake the U.S. CIA had made when they planned the Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba in 1960-61: they based the plan on the idea that the local population
would rebel en masse, and instead
the people mobilized, all right, but to defend their country and its government, not overthrow it.

The show includes a clip of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson giving a televised
speech explaining that in the Tet Offensive “the North Viet Namese were
defeated militarily, and they were defeated psychologically.” The first was
correct — even in Hue, the city the North Viet Namese came closest to
conquering, the North Viet Namese forces were ultimately defeated and forced to
withdraw, though only after nearly a month of bitter house-to-house fighting in
which two of Ken Burns’ main interviewees, U.S. Marines Bill Ehrhardt (white)
and Bill Harris (Black), recalled participating — while in Saigon the North
Viet Namese sent a commando unit to break into the U.S. Embassy but a South
Viet Namese security detail blocked them and killed most of them. The second
couldn’t have been more wrong: aided by U.S. media reporting that made the Tet
offensive seem less of a debacle for the North and the Viet Cong than it
actually was, Tet, more than anything else, made many Americans regard the war
as a lost cause and swing from supporting to opposing it. One incident in
particular came when a South Viet Namese officer ordered that a Viet Cong
fighter who was approaching and wanted either to surrender or defect be shot
and killed on the spot — and when the soldier he gave this order to hesitated,
the officer pulled out his own Colt .45 pistol and shot the man himself. Aside
from being a war crime, this was also militarily dumb; as the old intelligence
saying goes, “You can’t get information out of a corpse.” Any reasonably
sensible officer would have taken the man into custody and interrogated him. As
it was, the South Viet Namese officer not only gave the man a summary execution
but did so in front of a TV camera and a still photographer — and the still
photographer managed to capture the moment right when the officer had fired and
the bullet was entering the victim’s head and distending it just prior to
blowing it up. This became one of the most famous media images of the Viet Nam
war and a lot of the Americans who saw it began asking, “What are we doing
fighting a war and losing so many of our own people just to keep these
barbarians in power?”

During the first six months of 1968 “things fell apart”
in the U.S. as well: Lyndon Johnson ran in the New Hampshire Democratic
Presidential primary and, though he technically defeated challenger Eugene
McCarthy he did so by only seven percentage points. This provoked Robert
Kennedy to enter the Presidential race (my mom and I were both staunch McCarthy
supporters and thought of RFK as a man who marched onto the field to take over
as quarterback after McCarthy had already got us within a few yards of the
goalpost — my mom hated RFK with a passion and fervor that no doubt fueled my
own rather cynical view of him and his motives; not until Barack Obama defeated
Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries would my mom again loathe so completely a
politician who ostensibly shared many of her, and my, views) and Lyndon Johnson
to withdraw from it. On March 31 he made his famous announcement that “I shall
not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as
your President” — according to the book An American Melodrama by Godfrey Hodgson, Lewis Chester and Bruce Page, the
definitive history of the 1968 Presidential election, Johnson had worked out a
private signal with his wife by which he would give a gesture, known only to
her, to let her know just before he started speaking whether he’d announce his
withdrawal from the race or not — and when he gave the gesture she became only
the second person in the country to know he was going to drop out.

Geoffrey C.
Ward’s script gives a couple of conventional wisdom points that rankled me,
including claiming that polls showed half of McCarthy’s voters in New Hampshire
actually weren’t against the war,
but wanted it prosecuted more intensely, and also saying that Robert Kennedy
could well have got the Democratic Presidential nomination if he hadn’t himself
been killed in June 1968, two months after the assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr. and the nationwide spate of racial tension and rioting (the last thing King would have wanted to see in response to
his death!) that followed. The first point is an oversimplification; what
Americans were almost unanimous in rejecting was the whole concept of “limited
war” John F. Kennedy had put into place in Viet Nam and Lyndon Johnson had
continued — the idea that by measured steps of escalation an enemy could be
brought to the bargaining table — and what pollsters were actually recording in
1968 when they asked Americans about Viet Nam was a large group of people
saying, “We should withdraw, but if we’re not going to withdraw we should go
all out to win,” and another large group saying, “We should go all out to win,
and if we’re not going to do that we should withdraw.” Even after the Korean
debacle (where we had basically given up after three years and accepted the status
quo ante of two Koreas) most Americans
still thought of war as something that lasted a limited time and had a
definite, unambiguous, we-won you-lost outcome — the terms that had applied in
the U.S. Civil War, World War I and World War II. It was the whole concept of
“limited war” that rankled the American people about Viet Nam — it ran against
the national grain that if it was worthwhile to fight a war, you went all out
to win and threw whatever you had at the enemy; and if a war wasn’t worth doing
that, it wasn’t worth fighting at all.

The second — the idea that Robert
Kennedy could have won the Democratic nomination if he had lived — is frankly
nonsense: at the time the process was too totally controlled by party bosses
for the will of the people, as expressed by the significant votes Kennedy and
McCarthy had received in primaries (in the 14 states that had them, much fewer
than there are now at least partly because the parties changed the rules after
1968), to matter. Hubert Humphrey would have still been installed as the
Democrats’ nominee even though he hadn’t competed in a single primary, though
it’s possible the party bosses would have made the unity gesture of asking RFK
to be Humphrey’s running mate — which, if he’d accepted, would probably have
left a lot of anti-war Democrats
feeling as betrayed as they did for real. In short, even with a living RFK the
1968 Presidential election would probably have turned out the way it actually
did, with Richard Nixon and George Wallace racking up a combined 57 percent of
the vote to the Democrats’ 43 percent, ushering in the Right-wing age that has
persisted, with some temporary reversals, to our own time, when Donald Trump
won the White House frankly running as much or more against liberalism,
progressivism, counter-culturalism and anti-racism as Nixon and Wallace did in
1968 and Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and 1984. It’s also fascinating to be
reminded that hostility between the President and the U.S. media is nothing
new; The Viet Nam War is studded
with surviving tapes of private phone calls (every president from Franklin
Roosevelt to Richard Nixon recorded at least some of his White House
conversations, though Nixon was unique in setting up a system that recorded all of them — the earlier Presidents who recorded had
switches on their desks and their phones so they could decide, case-by-case,
whether a particular meeting or phone call should be recorded) in which
President Johnson lambasted the “lying media” and said they were deliberately
hurting the war effort — not that different from what we’ve been hearing from
Trump, except Trump is willing to say it publicly.

The Viet Nam War at its midpoint is getting into the political and
social conflicts the war engendered here at home, which are becoming more interesting
(in a way) than the story of the actual fighting “in country” — though one good
thing about this program is it outlines that the North Viet Namese leaders had
as much hubris as ours did.
Before I watched this I’d always thought of Tet as a brilliant strategic
calculation by the North Viet Namese to end the war by wiping out the U.S.
people’s confidence in their leaders; I’d had no idea they had actually
expected this series of pitched battles on enemy turf, which violated every
principle of how you win a guerrilla
war, to result in the fall of the South Viet Namese regime and the North’s
military conquest of all Viet Nam. Another good thing about the series is that
it’s an important counterweight to the romanticization of the North Viet Namese
and their cause a lot of us in the peace movement indulged in as the war
dragged on; we assumed that the North Viet Namese had the support of virtually
the entire Viet Namese population, which they didn’t (though they probably could have won a nationwide election if one had been held
as the original Geneva Accords of 1954 had promised); and we assumed they
weren’t committing war crimes — which they were, as were we. One of the most
chilling sequences came in a scene detailing the discovery of a mass grave in
which the North Viet Namese and National Liberation Front forces had buried
over 2,000 people they had summarily executed, a few because they were soldiers
in the South Viet Namese army or officials in the government, but some people
innocent of government ties who were simply swept up in the pogrom. The message was pretty well summed up in the title
of the episode just preceding this one, “This is what we do” — this is what war
is.

It was intriguing that of all the things Bill Ehrhardt did during the war,
the one he feels most guilty about — far more than he does over anyone he
actually killed — was when his company came upon a Viet Namese woman who was
willing to have sex with everyone in the unit in exchange for C-rations. At
first he balked at participating in what amounted to a mass rape, but
eventually — as much as a show of solidarity with the others in his unit as
anything else — he did. That, he said, made him feel guilty because “my mother
is a woman, my wife is a woman, and my daughter is a woman,” and he could
imagine any or all of them being similarly exploited sexually if a military
force came through and conquered the town where they were living. I’ve noted
before in my comments on The Viet Nam War that ever since men have been fighting wars, they’ve regarded rape as
one of the spoils of victory — which is another reason, besides the obvious ones, to be against war,
period — and Ehrhardt’s anecdote also reminded me of a similar story I heard
from a Gay man who had served with the U.S. armed forces in the Philippines.
His unit, too, had encountered a young woman who was willing to have sex with
them all for money or food, and though he was Gay and hadn’t the slightest
sexual interest in any woman, the
combination of peer pressure and the threat of exposure at a time (even before
“don’t ask, don’t tell”) when the U.S. military banned Queers from serving
altogether led him to compromise: he dropped his pants and pantomimed having sex with the woman, convincingly enough that
the other guys in his unit assumed he had.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Yesterday I wanted to watch the big “Global Citizen”
telethon MS-NBC has been regularly promoting (and which I was startled to find
out has been going on since 2013 — I haven’t heard of it before probably
because I wasn’t a regular MS-NBC viewer until Donald Trump got elected
President and, as much as they harp on the Trump-Russia investigation, they’ve
still been an island of sanity in the spiraling madness this country is going
through under the rule of Führer
Drumpf!) even though I wasn’t absolutely sure when it would start (the promos
announced the start time as “3 p.m. Eastern” and I didn’t know whether they were
going to start it in real time, which would mean noon our time, or have we West
Coast viewers suck hind tit with a tape delay again) or how long it would be. I suspect Charles was
disappointed that the show lasted so long (seven hours) that we didn’t have a
chance to go out together until we took a short walk through the neighborhood
later in the evening, but I was glad I watched it because, despite some hideous
glitches, for the most part it erased the foul taste left in my mouth by the
“Hand in Hand” mini-telethon from September 12 that was supposed to raise money
to clean up the damage and repair things after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma
(which of course have now been joined by a third, equally destructive one,
Maria, that hit Puerto Rico and took out its entire electrical power system —
the current estimates are it’s going to take months to restore electrical service to the entire island,
a reminder of just how much on the fringes of nature our whole modern lifestyle
is and one disaster can literally
plunge us back into the Dark Ages).

The “Global Citizen” show lasted seven
hours — an hour-long “pre-show” from noon to 1 p.m. (featuring interviews with
a few musical celebrities who weren’t performing — including one, John Cougar Mellencamp, who probably should
have; he was shown performing a song called “Easy Target” about the ability of
police officers to shoot down African-Americans with impunity, a powerful piece
that would have been even more powerful except that in one of the most
boneheaded production decisions of all time, the powers that be at MS-NBC
decided to show a chorus of it, then cut to an interview between Mellencamp and
Joe Scarborough, then another chorus, then another bit of interview, and so on
— when it was introduced as a performance between Mellencamp and Scarborough I
had actually hoped they would play the song together, since Scarborough is a
pretty capable rock guitarist and singer who’s recently released a CD of his
own which he promoted on Stephen Colbert’s show the night he was interviewed
about his kerfuffle with
President Trump) and a concert that lasted just shy of six hours. The musical
guest list was quite impressive — Stevie Wonder (the only performer here who
also appeared on “Hand in Hand”), Pharrell Williams (whom I usually can’t stand
but who, largely because he was performing here as a guest artist with Wonder
and his band, came off beautifully), Green Day, The Chainsmokers, Andra Day,
The Lumineers, The Killers, rapper Big Sean and teen diva Alessia Cara
(actually, according to her Wikipedia page, she’s 21), who opened the show and
turned out to be one of the best performers on it.

She isn’t anywhere near as zaftig as Adele but she obviously has a figure and isn’t
starving herself to concentration-camp-survivor dimensions the way so many
other young women singers do. She performed three songs, “Here,” “Stay” and her
star-making hit “Scars to Your Beautiful,” a slashing attack on the whole cult
of thin = beautiful and a plea to her audience to accept themselves no matter what their bodies look like. (I love the message, but it
also happens to be a great song!) She was also dressed unassumingly — a white
T-shirt with the word “EMPATHY” on it in letters formed by lines in various
rainbow colors, and a loose-fitting pair of camouflage pants — and, like Adele,
Maren Morris and other singers of today I particularly like, she relied on the
power of her singing and her songwriting to make her effect instead of drowning
herself in gargantuan production numbers à la Beyoncé. Musically she’s yet another one of Melanie’s
children — though Melanie herself has been pigeonholed as the hippie girl who
sang “Beautiful People,” “Lay Down” and “Brand New Key,” she was actually a far
more wide-ranging artist than that and her example seems to have filtered down
through plenty of other women singer-songwriters since — Cyndi Lauper, Tori
Amos, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Lorde — who like Melanie have sung in high-lying
voices with fast vibrato and written songs that alternate between the deeply
philosophical and the childlike. I was very impressed with Alessia Cara even though I’d never
heard of her before, and I put up a tweet to that effect. There was one big
problem with this show: not only did MS-NBC run all their usual commercials
during it, they did not bother to
time the commercial interruptions to what was going on on stage — with the
result that a lot of songs were heard only in excerpt form and items we were promised appeared either not at all or only as fragments. The
first artist on the bill to be so afflicted was the second performer up,
Detroit rapper Big Sean — whom I actually rather liked: despite my general
loathing for rap as a form, he came off as better than most of the breed
because his rapping was slower and more lyrical than usual, his musical backing
reached back to the classic soul styles of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and lyrically
his songs hearken back to the early, socially conscious rappers like
Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy (and The Last Poets before them!) rather
than the awful pro-capitalist, pro-conspicuous consumption, anti-woman,
anti-Queer and anti non-Black people of color crap we’ve heard from most
rappers, especially the “gangstas,” ever since.

Next up were The Killers,
formed in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2002 (though for some reason Charles thought
they were from Salt Lake City — a big difference culturally even if they’re not that far apart
geographically!), who sounded to me like yet another attempt to be an American
U2 and who rather irked me because, in an event one of whose guiding issues was
women’s equality and access to education and business opportunities, the lead
singer was standing behind a three-foot-tall male symbol. The band included
three women backup singers who stood behind female symbols — and I rather grimly
joked that if someone ever does a documentary on The Killers’ backup singers
they could call it 20 Feet from Sexism. Their four songs — “Mr. Brightside,” “All These Things … ,” an excerpt
of “Read My Mind” (MS-NBC’s commercials struck again!) and “When You Were
Young” — were pleasant enough U2 pastiches. Next up was the Lumineers, who
formed in New Jersey in 2005 (though they now live in Denver) and are described
on Wikipedia as “folk-rock/Americana.” I think that comes off mostly in lead
singer/guitarist Wesley Schultz’ appearance: he came on wearing a big hat with
long, scraggly hair and a long beard under his chin even though his cheeks were
relatively clean-shaven, a physical look that alerted the audience (this member
of it, anyway): “You’re going to be hearing ‘Americana’!” They obliged with
some nice originals — if I had to come up with a capsule description of their
sound it would be The Band meets Coldplay (though maybe I was just thinking of
Coldplay because Chris Martin had done one of the celebrity cameos before the
Lumineers went on) — their songs were called “Sleep on the Floor,” “Ophelia,”
“Stubborn Love” and “Cleopatra,” and the most beautiful moment of their
performance was the quite lovely slow version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s
“Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” they used as an introduction to “Cleopatra” (the
title track of their latest, and according to the MC who introduced them their
most socially conscious, album).

Then, as part of the overall educational
purpose of the show, there was a segment about the history of lynching of
African-Americans in the U.S. which was placed to tie in with the next segment,
gospel-soul singer Andra Day singing — what else — “Strange Fruit,” the 1939
song written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym “Lewis Allen” and introduced
by Billie Holiday (who was inspired to sing it when her father, guitarist
Clarence Holiday, was in a car accident in the South and according to the
inflexible laws of segregation was taken past the emergency room of the whites-only
hospital and died before the ambulance driver could get him to the E.R. of the
Black hospital — this story eventually got conflated with the death of Bessie
Smith the same year, 1937, even though it is not how Bessie died). The segment would have worked the
way the concert organizers intended if Andra Day had sung the song simply and
straightforwardly, the way Billie did on her famous 1939 record (her biggest
hit to that point and the release that established the success of the
independent Commodore label, for whom she recorded it after her usual label,
Columbia, wouldn’t touch it). Billie’s chilling understatement drove every line
of the song home with the force of a thrown dagger penetrating a tree; Andra
Day made the mistake of throwing the full armamentarium of her professionally
trained gospel-soul voice — leaps, screams, “worrying” notes, improvising and
moaning — at “Strange Fruit”; technically she could have sung rings around
Billie but emotionally she almost totally missed the point. Day did considerably
better with her own songs, vehicles designed to take that kind of singing: “Stand Up for
Something,” “Rise Up” (comparable to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” and Yoko
Ono’s “Rising” as an inspiring anthem, even though you can write just a halfway
decent song around that title and concept and still make an uplifting effect) and a slice of “I Want It
All” (yet another of those damnable commercial breaks cut off most of that song
and gave us just the climax).

Next up were The Chainsmokers (Charles joked that
probably most people today don’t know what the phrase “chain smoker” means — it
means a smoker who smokes so continually s/he lights each new cigarette from
the dying embers of the previous one), who are listed on Wikipedia as “a
DJ/production duo” consisting of Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall. They were
probably the two sexiest guys on the whole show — before Taggart made his
appearance Pall came on in a white T-shirt and lime-green sweat pants, carrying
a pair of drumsticks and beating on various bits of electronic percussion as a
pre-recorded track of women vocalists and a dreamy pop backing played in the
background. Then Taggart entered, and he was wearing a white T-shirt and
skin-tight blue jeans that showed off an enviable basket (as had Pall’s sweat
pants). They were so far apart on the Central Park, New York stage that it was
difficult at times to tell just how many people there were in the band — I
counted three, a conventional drummer in addition to Taggart and Pall — or how
they related to each other. Perhaps reflecting their DJ origins, they blended
each of the songs they played into a set-long medley: “(I Want to Be) The One,”
“Closer,” “Honest,” “Paris,” “Something Just Like This” and “Don’t Let Me Down”
(the last song I probably would have liked better if they hadn’t ripped off the
title from a much better song by
The Beatles), and once again one of their songs got abysmally truncated by a
commercial interruption. They were considerably more fun to look at than to
listen to — indeed they came off as the closest group on the bill to a boy band
— though their music was appealing and lacked the aggressive ugliness of a lot
of what DJ’s who try to cross over into full-fledged music-making come up with.

Then came Green Day’s fairly extended set of eight songs covering most of their
career, and it was amusing how front man Billie Joe Armstrong changed his
guitar throughout the set to mirror the content of each song and what part of
his band’s history it came from. He started with a guitar painted to look like
an American flag, only in black-and-white — the red stripes were black and so
was the blue field on which the white stars appeared — which I believe was a
design he started using in response to the George W. Bush administration, led
by a President he called an “American idiot.” (Inevitably he played “American
Idiot” as part of his set, changing “Bush” to “Trump.” Maybe he should call it
“American Idiot II”!!) He used that guitar for “Know Your Enemy,” an excerpt of
“Holiday” (once again a song wretchedly truncated by commercials), and
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (a song that, unlike the Chainsmokers’ “Don’t Let
Me Down,” does hold its own in
comparison with the classic from which its writer ripped off the title), before
switching to one with a motif
from the cover of the band’s star-making 1994 album Dookie (which I heard when it was new and remember
thinking, “This is what Elvis Costello would have sounded like if the Clash
instead of the Attractions had been his backup band”) for “Minority” and a
plain guitar for “American Idiot,” “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” and “Good
Riddance (Time of Your Life).” It’s amazing how Green Day has been able to rise
from the ghetto of punk rock to enough mainstream success that their songs got
turned into a Broadway musical, and despite his travails Armstrong remains a
strong performer, front man and writer.

Then Stevie Wonder held the stage for
nearly an hour and a half, running through mostly his great hits from the
1970’s, and starting his performance by dropping to his knees as a gesture of
support to the National Football League players who are protesting anti-Black
police brutality while the national anthem is played at their games — and whom
President Trump called on the NFL team owners (many of them gave seven-figure
sums to his campaign) to fire immediately. (The ones like Colin Kaepernick, who
were reaching the ends of their careers anyway, probably are in jeopardy from
this; but no team owner is going
to fire someone at the height of his career who’s going to help them win
football games and maybe make it to the Super Bowl. They may be Right-wingers
but they’re also too smart capitalists to launch a career vendetta like that!)
He got up rather uncertainly, helped by his son Kwame (one of a number of grown
children Wonder has fathered over the years, all of whom he seems to have given
African names), and for the first song on his set he did “Jammin’ (Master
Blaster),” his memorial tribute to Bob Marley. Then he did the song he should have done on “Hand in Hand,” “Higher Ground,”
following which there was a song on his set that I missed almost completely
because they cut away for a commercial break while he was still playing the
intro and didn’t return until he was almost done. After that he did “Signed, Sealed,
Delivered” (a 1968 hit and the only song Wonder played last night that came
from before he gained control of his career and started producing himself with
the 1970 album Where I’m Coming From)
and a medley of “Overjoyed” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Then he did
“Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” and the beautiful “Living in the City” (the
socially conscious song Wonder recorded after his Motown label-mate Marvin Gaye
broke Motown president Berry Gordy’s taboo on political material with the What’s
Going On LP), following which he did one of
my least favorite Wonder songs, “Isn’t She Lovely?,” though it sounded a bit
better this time because he said it was dedicated to his oldest child, daughter
Ayesha, and its sappiness is more understandable as a father-daughter song than
as a romantic love song.

Alas, yet another commercial break at this point
lopped off most of “Sir Duke,” a favorite Wonder song of mine if only because
it’s a tribute to Duke Ellington — the artist who lobbied for (and wrote a song
to promote) the designation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a national
holiday paying tribute to the genius who composed Black, Brown and
Beige — and after that he hinted he was
going to perform “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” (one of those songs, like
Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” I liked at first, then got thoroughly sick
of when it got way overplayed,
then heard again a few years later and thought, “That was really a good song
after all!”). Instead he did “My Cherie Amour” and then went into “We Are the
World,” the song he wrote with Michael Jackson for the 1985 “USA for Africa”
fundraising campaign, for which he was joined by Pharrell Williams essentially
taking Michael’s part. Wonder and Williams continued to perform together for the
rest of his set, doing “Get Lucky,” “Superstition” and Williams’ song “Happy” —
which generally has struck me as one of the most putridly banal songs ever
written (I once joked that I never thought anybody could write a song about
happiness worse than Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but Williams
pulled it off), but in this context — after a show that had been studded with
various officials from the United Nations and its member countries (the “Global
Citizen” concerts are deliberately timed to coincide with the annual meeting of
the United Nations General Assembly) about such evils as famine,
impoverishment, lack of access to clean water and safe toilets (though when an
official from Nigeria discussed the problems his country has in getting everyone
access to safe toilets I grimly muttered, “Hey! We can’t even do that in San
Diego, and we have a hepatitis A outbreak
on our hands because we can’t!”), the oppression of women — including forced
marriages of teen (or pre-teen) girls, rape and denial of education and
business opportunities — and AIDS, a song about happiness, even a silly and
stupid one, was actually a welcome relief. Then Wonder came out again with that
weird little tablet-sized mini-keyboard which seems to be his go-to instrument
whenever he covers the Beatles — he used it for “We Can Work It Out” on the
celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on
the Ed Sulllivan Show and last
night he used it to cover John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song almost de
rigueur for a major “Cause Celeb” benefit,
following which the various musical guests all came out for a reprise of
“Happy.”

Despite the infuriating commercial breaks and the spotting of them
with absolutely no cognizance of what was going on on stage, in all other
respects the “Global Citizen” telecast was a model of how this sort of thing
should be done: the artists (even the lesser-known ones like Alessia Cara) were
given enough time on stage to showcase themselves, the show was long enough to
make that possible and the speech-making, though it got interminable at times,
actually had a context. Predictably, the one segment that really rankled me was
the one expressing the mainstream myth of “HIV/AIDS,” especially when the
scientist from Johnson & Johnson announced that his company was about to
start major efficacy trials of a proposed AIDS vaccine in humans — and Whoopi
Goldberg came on to rejoice that the scientist had announced a major step
forward in a cure for AIDS. He hadn’t; he’d announced a major step forward in a
vaccine for AIDS, which is not the same thing even if you believe in an AIDS
vaccine (which pioneering AIDS dissident scientist Peter Duesberg pointed out
is an oxymoron, because you’re defined as having “HIV/AIDS” if you test
positive for antibodies to the virus — and the “AIDS vaccine,” if it works,
will give you antibodies to the virus and thereby make you “HIV positive”!).

The real problem with Global
Citizen as an organization is that it claims to be aimed at ending “extreme
poverty” (indeed, one of the speakers boasted that since 1982 the percentage of
the world’s people in “extreme poverty” has gone down from 52 to 18 percent —
though a) I’m not sure how they came up with those statistics, and b) even 18
percent is 18 percent too many), but at the same time they rely so much on the largesse of major corporate and rich-individual donors like
Sumner Redstone (who came up with a last-minute $1.5 million contribution to
make the first Global Citizen concert in 2013 possible) and Mark Cuban (who was
prominently featured on stage) they can’t — or won’t — mention the basic
class-struggle fact that the reason there are poor people in the world is that
there are rich people in the world, and the rich sustain themselves on the
basis of what Marx called the “surplus value” extracted from the poor by the
rich. Doubtless the programs advocated on Global Citizen are going to get some
of the right money to some of the right people — and I give them major kudos for making one of their demands to preserve the U.S.
foreign aid budget instead of cutting it by 32 percent as President Trump has
called for in his budget — but they’re relying too much on the kindness of the
super-rich to talk about the class structure and the organized machinery of
oppression and exploitation that is making the overall distribution of wealth
and income in the world increasingly less equal. Still, Global Citizen puts on a good show for a good cause, and
if it starts making at least some
of its idealistic participants (you earned admission to the concert by racking
up “points” for various good deeds, including sending texts and tweets to
politicians) think more deeply about why there is poverty, hunger, ill health, oppression of women and
preventable disease epidemics throughout the world, it’ll have done some of the
good its organizers obviously intend it to!

I put on a Doctor Blake
Mysteries episode on PBS: “Crossing
the Line” from 2014, set in 1958 and depicting a fire in the projection room of
the local movie theatre (which is showing, of all films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — not exactly a non-mainstream movie but still
pretty recherché fare for a small-town
theatre in the Australian outback) which kills its projectionist, Adam Summers
(Ted Stryke). In an anachronistic mistake I red-flagged on imdb.com, a
firefighter tries to revive Summers with CPR — which didn’t exist until the
1960’s. The cops initially suspect the owner of the theatre trying to burn the
place down for the insurance, but eventually Dr. Lucien Blake (Craig McLachlan)
deduces that the fire was actually started because Patrick Tyneman (John Wood),
spoiled son of local land baron Edward Tyneman (Lee Beckhurst), had formed a
ring to make and show pornographic movies, shooting them at a local estate his
dad had given him and forcing people, like the usher at the theatre (who, in a
touch that really dates this movie, is shown
walking the aisles of the theatre selling cigarettes as well as popcorn!), to
be his on-screen talent by blackmailing them. In her case, Patrick had loaned
her brother a large sum of money to start a business which had failed, and
Patrick offered to “forgive” the debt if she would agree to let herself get
fucked before his cameras. Adam Summers was part of this gang because he owned
a 16 mm projector and provided the expertise needed to show the films, and
though they promised they wouldn’t show them outside of the town of Ballarat,
where the Doctor Blake stories
take place, in fact they exhibited them all over the country — and the
reluctant porn star’s dad happened to see one of them at a stag party he went
to and, while everyone else was laughing and having a great time, he was so
ashamed at seeing his daughter doing it on screen he determined to have his
revenge, first killing Summers and then Patrick. When Patrick’s dad finds out
what he’s accused of he pulls the family attorney he’d assigned Patrick and
essentially disowns his son, leaving him on his own to face the consequences of
his actions for the first time in his life. This wasn’t the best Doctor
Blake episode I’ve seen but the
show remains reliably entertaining and has that odd reticence that makes
British mysteries so appealing (and it’s revealing that the one murder that
takes place is committed by rendering the victim unconscious and then locking
him in a sealed room and starting a fire — no gunplay or literal bloodshed).

I managed to spend most of the morning in front of the TV
set — watching the Superman serial and
also the 1955 movie This Island Earth, produced at Universal and starring Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue and Rex
Reason in a Technicolor science-fiction epic directed by Joseph M. Newman. I’ve
already noted Newman’s deficiencies as a director in my comments on Kiss
of Fire, which he made the same year (a
movie which also suffered from casting deficiencies — Jack Palance and Barbara
Rush in roles which cried out for Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth), but while This
Island Earth wasn’t anywhere near as good
as the other “serious” sci-fi movies of its period (The Thing, The
Day the Earth Stood Still and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers) — and certainly would have profited by the
involvement of any of the auteurs
of those films (Hawks, Wise or Siegel) — Newman was at least more in his
element in this genre than he was in an historical costume romance. Morrow
stars as Exeter, a scientist from the planet Metaluna, who seeks the
intervention of Earth’s leading experts on atomic energy in order to restore
the force-field that is protecting Metaluna from the attacks being launched,
almost constantly, from a neighboring planet, Zagon. Reason and Domergue play
two of the Earth scientists who are virtually kidnapped to work on Exeter’s
project, recruited through a taste of Metalunan technology and the offer to
work in a secret laboratory for an unnamed employer (given the 1950’s, and the
fact that up until three-fifths of the way through the movie, the fact that
Exeter is from another planet is kept carefully unspecified, one wonders why
they don’t suspect they’re being recruited by the Soviets).

The main defect of this movie is the script by Franklin Coen
and Edward G. O’Callaghan, which took an essentially interesting story (the
basis was a novel by Raymond Jones, who presumably explained the title —
something the movie never does) and managed to miss, or dramatize just at the
most superficial level, all the potential conflicts that would have made it
interesting. Still, the movie is absolutely ravishing to look at — thanks to
the photography of Clifford Stine and the special-effects work (Stine and David
Horsley were co-credited with the effects), as well as the uniquely 1950’s conception
of what an alien planet would look like (art directors Alexander Golitzen and
Richard Reidel — though Golitzen’s was probably just a department-head credit
and it’s unlikely he did specific work on this film — and set decorators Russel
Hausman and Julia Heron), dated but still visually appealing (it looks like one
of the earlier “space rides” at Disneyland, actually). The cast is workmanlike
— though, with all the advantages of Metalunan technology, it’s surprising that
they couldn’t have come up with a more convincing wig for Morrow to wear as
Exeter (and Lance Fuller, as another, more doctrinaire Metalunan who keeps
pressuring Exeter to use the “thought transference” brainwashing machine on Our
Hero and Heroine, despite Exeter’s protestations that it will make them less
useful scientists, has to wear just as bad a wig as Morrow does) — and the
color helps, though the story could stand a remake (maybe John Carpenter could
do it — he’s done well by other 1950’s sci-fi classics in his underrated remake
of The Thing from 1982 and his 1989
near-masterpiece, They Live,
which made the powerful personal
metaphor of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers into a political one) which would actually dramatize all the
potential story points evaded or worked “around” in this version. — 10/31/94

=====

This Island Earth was
a much better movie — a genuine, though flawed, sci-fi classic (and, at least
judging from the excerpt published in the book They Came from Outer
Space, a more exact transcription of Raymond
F. Jones’ source novel than most sci-fi films of the time). The film could have
done without that horrible mutant that emerges at the end, the makeups on the
aliens from Metaluna could have been more convincing (“Why do aliens in sci-fi
movies always have to wear really bad wigs?” Charles asked), and we could have
been given some idea of what the
war between Metaluna and its neighboring planet Zagon was all about — as it is,
the ship bearing Exeter (the nice Metalunan) and the two scientists he’s brought
back from Earth arrives just in time to witness the destruction of Metaluna and
(in an interesting anticipation of Arthur C. Clarke) its conversion from a
planet into a star (a special effect that remains convincing and incredibly
beautiful), whereupon Exeter sacrifices his own life (a laThe Last of the Mohicans — he’s the last of the Metalunans) to get Our Hero
and Our Heroine back to earth. One could wish for a remake that would be more
complex, more sensitively written and equipped with state-of-the-art effects,
but the movie we have is moving and at times awesomely beautiful (as when we
first see the skyline of Metaluna, a ravishingly colored matte painting, and
realize how defenseless the planet really is against the ceaseless bombardment
by the Zagonian energy weapons). — 6/6/97

•••••

I ran the science-fiction movie This Island Earth from 1955, which I’ve been curious about re-seeing
since I recently read Raymond F. Jones’ source novel and found the first half
of the movie tracked the novel surprisingly closely but the second half was
radically different. Both book and film begin in the labs of Ryberg Electronics
in Arizona, where principal scientist Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason) is working
on a machine to turn lead into uranium to create an inexhaustible source of
atomic fuel for nuclear reactors. Only the capacitors available to him can’t
take the sheer voltage level needed for the machine to work, so he orders new
ones — but instead of what he was expecting he receives an envelope stating
that he’s being sent a substitute which looks like a bunch of glass beads. He
tests the beads along with his colleague Joe Wilson (Robert Nichols) and
realizes they actually do work as
condensers — and what’s more, they accommodate such high levels of voltage
they’re clearly unlike any technology he’s ever heard of before. Then he gets a
mysterious electronics catalog printed not on paper but on some sort of
flexible metal, which offers a kit to manufacture a product called an
“interocitor.” Naturally Meacham has no idea what an interocitor is or what it
does, but he’s so curious he orders the kit (which comes with a solemn warning
that if any part is lost, stolen or accidentally destroyed it will not be replaced — in the book Meacham and his crew
actually do destroy a part by
accident and the mystery firm that sent it to them sends back a note that they
won’t replace it, which forces them to jury-rig something that will take its
place), builds the interocitor and finds that the entire operation has been a
recruitment and testing operation from a mysterious company that is recruiting
engineers for a project in an underground lab. The catch is that the scientists
working on it will have to live there and won’t be allowed contact with the
outside world — though they will
be given nice places to stay, fabulous meals and all the accoutrements they want. The project is run by a man named Exeter
(Jeff Morrow), who looks like a normal human except for his shock of white
hair, abnormally (for us, anyway) elongated head and crease in the middle of
his forehead, and ultimately it turns out that he’s from another planet and he
uses a spacecraft to fly Dr. Meacham and his assistant, Dr. Ruth Adams (Faith
Domergue, who actually met and briefly dated Meacham three years earlier but
can’t acknowledge him because their sinister employers want there to be no
emotional contacts between their workers that might distract them from their
tasks), to their home base for further work on the mysterious project.

It’s at
this point that Jones’ novel and the script by Franklin Coen and George
Callahan diverge: in the book Exeter (who, if I recall correctly, is actually
called something else) is the representative of a federation of planets that’s
fighting an ongoing war against another federation, an evil one — the Cold War
parallels between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the satellite countries on
both sides, is quite obvious — and the reason for the title, which isn’t
explained in the film, is that just like U.S. companies have outsourced much of
their industrial production to Third World countries, many of them located on
islands, because the labor is cheaper, so his federation has outsourced both
production and R&D to “island” planets, located far away in the galaxy from
the ones that are warring with each other, where labor and other costs will be
cheaper. Only in Jones’ novel the existence of factories on Earth turning out
goods to maintain the good federation’s military machine has been noticed by
the bad federation, which determines to destroy Earth just to handicap the good
federation’s war production — and in the end Meacham and Adams have to trick
the representatives of both
federations into leaving Earth alone and carrying out their battle somewhere
else. Screenwriters Coen and Callahan changed much of that: in their version
Exeter is the representative of a planet called Metaluna that has been fighting
an extended war with a rival planet, Zagon. The reason they need Meacham and
Adams is that they’ve shielded themselves from Zagon’s interstellar missiles by
means of a force field powered by nuclear energy — only they’ve depleted their
total supply of uranium and need someone who can supply them a new way to make
atomic fuel. The problem is that by the time Exeter’s spacecraft arrives on his
home planet, it’s too late: the Zagonite energy missiles are already breaching
the Metalunan force field and it’s only a matter of time before the planet is
utterly destroyed.

Exeter, who in previous scenes has been depicted as a real
S.O.B. whose only saving grace is that the other Metalunans we see — Exeter’s
sidekick Brack (Lance Fuller) and “The Monitor” (Douglas Spencer), president of
Metaluna’s governing council — are even worse (Exeter casually has two of the
scientists he’s recruited to the project, Dr. Steve Carlson [Russell Johnson]
and German-speaking Dr. Adolph Engelbord [Karl L. Lindt], killed for attempting
to escape the Metalunan campus on earth) — becomes a tragic figure as he flees
Metaluna in the spacecraft, taking Meacham and Adams with him, then essentially
sacrifices his own life to make sure they get home safely. This
Island Earth has acquired a bad reputation
because the makers of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 chose it as their “target” when they decided to do a
feature-film version of their TV show mocking old movies, and it does have its silly aspects: the high-tech gizmos and
especially the spacecraft, no doubt impressive to 1955 audiences, look pretty
fake today, and the writers couldn’t resist writing in a bug-eyed monster (a
sort of mutant supposedly created by the Zagonite energy weapons tweaking
Metalunan DNA, or whatever their genetic material is, in a tacky-looking
costume under which is all-purpose Universal-International stunt double Edwin
Parker, who’d previously filled in for Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. in their later Universal horror pics) to menace Our Heroes
both on Metaluna and when it stows away on the spaceship. (Meacham and Adams
are in large plastic cylinders that are supposed to adjust their bodies to the
differences in air pressure between Earth and Metaluna when it starts menacing
them from outside, and I couldn’t help but think that Coen and Callahan had
seen the 1932 film Doctor “X” —
though unlike the people in Doctor “X” Meacham and Adams are able to escape their plastic confinements and
wait until the injuries Mr. Mutant suffered back on Metaluna do him in aboard
the spaceship). It also doesn’t help that, like The Day the Earth
Stood Still, This Island Earth has a line
of abysmally clunky religious dialogue obviously put there to appease the
Jesuits who were still in charge at the Production Code Administration, when
Meacham tells his Metalunan captors, “Our true size is the size of our God!”

But
all in all, This Island Earth is
one of the better science-fiction movies of the 1950’s, at or just below the
level of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Forbidden Planet (whose makers actually borrowed some sets and props
from This Island Earth). Its
morals and especially its politics are considerably more ambiguous than the straight
Cold War propaganda of the source novel: one can read the conflict between
Metaluna and Zagon as a Cold War metaphor (Zagon as the Soviet Union or the
Communist bloc as a whole, Metaluna as the U.S. and its allies who thought they
could handle the outside danger by “containing” it), or one can give it a more
radical reading as a statement on the futility and wanton destructiveness of all war (especially since it came from the studio that
had produced the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front a quarter-century earlier). Exeter’s emergence as a
tragic figure and his well-wrought philosophical reaction to the destruction of
his planet (one could make a case that This Island Earth essentially ends where the Superman mythos begins) alone gives This Island Earth more philosophical depth than the common run of
1950’s science-fiction movies and brings it closer to the sophistication of the
best sci-fi writers of the time — which is a real surprise when one reads the
novel, because Raymond F. Jones was not one of the best sci-fi writers of the time and the book is
straightforward with virtually none of the hints of psychological or ethical
complexity of the movie. This time I liked This Island Earth the film a good deal better than I had when I’d seen
it before — though I still think
it deserves a modern-day remake that would make explicit what the writers and
director (Joseph M. Newman, a Universal-International contractee with a hacky
reputation who acquits himself quite well here) could only hint at in 1955,
with the Production Code Administration as well as the studio “suits” breathing
down their necks. — 9/24/17

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Last night I watched a quite good Live
from the Belly Up episode featuring “The
Mick Fleetwood Blues Band with Rick Vito.” Mick Fleetwood, you’ll recall, is
the drummer for Fleetwood Mac and has had that gig since the band started in
1968 — it was named after him and the original bass player, John McVie, who met
in the 1967 edition of John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with lead guitarist Peter
Green and decided to form a blues band of their own. They added a young British
musician named Jeremy Spencer and the four of them recorded the first Fleetwood
Mac album, called simply Fleetwood Mac, at the CBS Studios in London in 1969 for Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon
label. Blue Horizon was a label that specialized in reissuing American blues
records, including quite a lot of Elmore James (they licensed the tapes of
James’ last sessions in 1963 for Bobby Robinson’s Fire label — Fire was one of
only a handful of labels recording African-American music in the 1950’s that
was actually Black-owned — and so Elmore James became one of Blue Horizon’s
most prolific artists even though he’d been dead for four years when the label
was founded), and in recording British musicians who played in the American
blues style. (Their biggest acts were Fleetwood Mac and the Aynsley Dunbar
Retaliation, another band formed by an ex-Mayall drummer.) They made three
albums with that four-piece lineup, one for Blue Horizon and two for Andrew
Loog Oldham’s short-lived Immediate Records label, as well as a marvelous set
of recordings, originally issued as Blues Jam in Chicago and later in the mid-1970’s as Fleetwood Mac in
Chicago (an obvious attempt to
cash in on the later success of a quite different, in both personnel and style,
Fleetwood Mac, though anyone who bought Fleetwood Mac in Chicago expecting it to sound anything like Rumours would have been sorely disappointed!), in which
the Macsters backed real Black blues musicians from the Windy City. (For me the
high point of that album was the appearance of Elmore James’ surviving band,
led by saxophonist J. T. Brown, backing Jeremy Spencer on great performances of
some of James’ songs.) In the early days Fleetwood Mac’s material was almost
all blues — either covers of Black blues songs or their own originals written
in the same style — until the band in general and Peter Green in particular got
to be more experimental and started sniffing around what would eventually
become known as “progressive rock.” Green started writing and playing long,
atmospheric songs, many of them either outright instrumentals or long jams with
just bits of vocal. He also started taking a lot of LSD, and after one of his
trips he announced to his fellow band members that from then on he wanted them
to take just enough money for bare subsistence, and give the rest away to
various charities. Needless to say, the other band members weren’t too thrilled
about that, so they fired Green and hired another guitar player, Danny Kirwan,
to take his place. Then, just as the new Fleetwood Mac was about to start a
major U.S. tour, Jeremy Spencer suddenly became a born-again Christian and quit
the group to join the Children of God cult. Since there was no time to break in
another new musician and teach him
all their material for their tour, the band had to go, hat in hand, to Peter
Green and ask him to rejoin — which Green agreed to do, but only for that one tour. Over the next few years the
band went through various personnel changes and morphed their music from blues
to mainstream rock, and they added the other three members — McVie’s then-wife
Christine, Lindsay Buckingham and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks — recording another album simply called Fleetwood
Mac in 1975 and then following
it up with the 1977 mega-success Rumours. The “new Fleetwood Mac” hung together for a while, broke up more due to
personal than musical issues, and periodically have re-formed for widely
publicized and highly lucrative reunions. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood decided to
form a side project that would allow him to get back to his blues roots, and
the result was the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band — though I couldn’t help but make
the joke, when Charles arrived home early on while this show was on, that with
his other band Mick Fleetwood gets
to play stadia and with this band he gets to play bars. The Mick Fleetwood
Blues Band is a solid band that puts on a good show and, like the original
Fleetwood Mac, relies for material on a mix of Black blues covers (Elmore James
in particular) and originals in blues style. If they have a weakness, it’s
their front man, singer-guitarist Rick Vito, who’s a perfectly competent
blues-rock player but one would think that someone with Mick Fleetwood’s
prestige and money could get a stronger, more assertive, more charismatic
musician. Through much of the show I wondered what this band would sound like with
Joe Bonamassa fronting it; though Bonamassa’s e-mails get awfully strange at
times he is an excellent player (in a
review of one of his own performances on PBS I called him the best white blues
guitarist to emerge since the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990 — has it
really been that long?) and a collaboration
between him and Mick Fleetwood would
be considerably more exciting than the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band as it stands.
Fleetwood himself remains an excellent drummer, though when the show opened I
was struck by the sheer amount of equipment he had on stage — at least four
tom-toms, two or three bass drums and three crash cymbals as well as a set of
little bells and a gong that looks like Fleetwood bought it at J. Arthur Rank’s
garage sale — and couldn’t help but reflect how much Gene Krupa got out of just
a snare drum, two tom-toms, a bass drum, two crash cymbals and a hi-hat. Much
of the material the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band played was from Fleetwood Mac’s
first three albums — including the song “Black Magic Woman,” which Peter Green
wrote for Fleetwood Mac’s second album (Vito mentioned that in the U.S. it bore
the title English Rose and the
cover shot was Mick Fleetwood in drag — Fleetwood was predictably embarrassed
that his band’s front man was reminding people of this) but which didn’t become
a huge international hit until Santana covered it (less effectively, I might
add, mainly because Carlos Santana, a great technician, simply isn’t as
creative or individualistic a guitarist as Peter Green). They began with a song
called “Fleetwood Boogie” which I suspect was written especially for this band,
then went into a cover of another Peter Green original for the first Fleetwood
Mac, a minor hit called “Oh Well,” and then a cover of an Elmore James song called
“My Baby’s Hot.” Then they did a medley of two blues songs, “Rollin’ Man” and
“Voodoo Woman,” followed by their version of “Black Magic Woman” — which was
quite good even though Vito probably didn’t relish having to compete with both Peter Green and Carlos Santana! Then they switched
gears for a nice bit of New Orleanian funk called “Lucky Devil,” for which Mick
Fleetwood got up from his huge drum set and played another set of drums, and the keyboard player, Mark
Johnstone — whom I thought was the best musician in the band next to Fleetwood
himself: though he was playing two stacked Roland electronic keyboards he had
one set to sound like a real blues piano and the other like a Hammond B-3
organ, so the sounds were authentic and right for the music — doubled on
harmonica. Later another percussionist, Paulinho Morelli (at least I think that’s the name — he’s not listed on the official
Mick Fleetwood Blues Band Web site and I suspect he was a guest the Belly Up
Tavern brought in for this gig), took over that second drum set for a long song
that was a blend of an instrumental called “Passage East” (which I suspect was
a Peter Green composition because it was strongly reminiscent of Green’s more
atmospheric instrumentals, both with Mac and on the beautiful 1971
all-instrumental solo album The End of the Game he recorded right after he left the band for the
last time) and a song called “World Turning.” The band’s final song (of nine; Live
at the Belly Up is one of those TV shows
where the number of songs the band is able to squeeze into the hour-long time
slot says a lot about their musical style
— I’ve seen progressive-rock acts play only four, five or six songs in the slot
and pop and blues acts play 12) was the searing Elmore James blues “Shake Your
Money Maker,” which Fleetwood Mac played (with Jeremy Spencer on lead vocal and
slide guitar) on their first album; Vito was hardly in Spencer’s league, let
alone James’, but the message still got through and it was one of the
infectious things the band played all night. Live at the Belly Up is one of the most important local resources for
live music on KPBS — as the Belly Up Tavern itself remains a huge asset to the
local music scene as well as a favored venue for major acts (like Fleetwood and
Joan Osborne), as well as their offspring (Willie Nelson’s son Lukas has played
a Live at the Belly Up telecast
with his band Promise of the Real), doing off-beat side projects. Though not a
patch on the Black musicians who created these sounds — in the 1960’s, when I
first started listening to British blues records, they sounded a lot better
than they do now, when the American originals they were covering are readily
available in reissues of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore
James and others — the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band is a quite appealing
blues-rock act, and the large, grey-haired, grey-bearded Mick Fleetwood himself
has the look of an ancient sage behind all those drums, someone who has
traveled the world to bring back wisdom in the form of a 12-bar blues.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Charles and I
watched the fifth episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward
documentary The Viet Nam War
(incidentally Charles challenged my insistence on spelling “Viet Nam” as two
words, unhyphenated, saying that the Viet Namese consulate in the U.S. uses the
“Vietnam” spelling that was commonplace in the American media when the Viet Nam
war was actually happening), which was called “This Is What We Do” — after the
reminiscence of a soldier who fought in the war who when he complained, early on
in his tour, about the inhumane things he was expected to do, was told by his
commanding officer, “This is war. This is what we do.” The period covered in
this episode was from July to December 1967, during which North Viet Namese
Communist Party general secretary Le Duan (who according to this series was the
real power running
North Viet Nam; by that time, Ward’s script argues, Ho Chi Minh was just a
figurehead) decided the North Viet Namese army and their allies, the National
Liberation Front (so-called “Viet Cong”) in the south would launch a major
offensive starting on the date of the Viet Namese lunar new year, Tet, on
January 31, 1968. (Tet was a defeat for the North Viet Namese in military terms
but a triumph for them politically: though they weren’t able to bring down the
South Viet Namese government or conquer any major cities, they virtually
destroyed the support base for the war among the American people, boosted the
anti-war insurgent candidacies of Eugene McCarthy — who makes what amounts to a
cameo appearance at the end of this show — and Robert Kennedy and brought down
Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency. But then, as I’ve pointed out before, that’s how all successful guerrilla armies win: they
wear down the will of the occupying country’s people to fight.)

There were some
fascinating stories, including one from Jim Musgraves (at least I think I’m recalling his name right), a quite
personable (and attractive, even 50 years later) man from Missouri who like a
lot of other boys from America’s heartland bought into the idea that the Viet
Nam war was a) a noble struggle against Communism any right-thinking American
male of military age would want to be part of, and b) his generation’s
opportunity to serve the country the way World War II had been for his parents’
generation. He was so severely wounded in one firefight his chest was literally ripped open, and though he was evacuated
by helicopter he was visited by about four or five doctors who gave up on him,
saying there was nothing they could do for him — one even asked what religion
he was so he could call the appropriate chaplain to give him last rites — until
finally he lucked out with a doctor who said, “Why isn’t this man being
treated?” Musgraves also said that after his first week in Viet Nam “I never killed
another human being” — not because he stopped fatally shooting the people who
were shooting at him, or trying to, or might have been there to do so, or even looked vaguely like people who might have been
trying to do so, but because he started thinking of them as “dinks,” “slopes”
and “gooks” (all terms of abuse that had come from previous U.S. war or racism
against Asians — Ward’s narration includes a brief etymology for each) and he
could therefore kill them with a clear conscience — just as people on the other
side (one of the best aspects of this program is the fact that they extensively
interviewed people who fought on the Northern side — even though between them
and the South Viet Namese who were also interviewed, and Burns’ and Novick’s
decision to give the translations via subtitles instead of voice-overs, leads
to an awful lot of Viet Namese on the soundtrack) called Americans “puppets,”
“imperialists” and “monsters.”

The story of the part of the war covered in
“This Is What We Do” (a title with an oddly fatalistic air) is one of a steady
escalation on both sides, and President Johnson’s response to Robert McNamara’s
series of secret memos explaining that the current strategy was not working and
the war could not be won, which was to arrange for him to be appointed
president of the World Bank and for long-time Democratic fixer Clark Clifford
to replace McNamara as Secretary of Defense. It also covered the disputed 1967
election in South Viet Nam, in which the U.S. prevailed on the principal rivals
in the government, Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, not to run against each
other but instead to form a ticket with Thieu as President and Ky as
Vice-President — and despite extensive election rigging and fraud the Thieu-Ky
ticket only got 35 percent of the vote, though without provision for a runoff
they were declared elected. (Shortly after the election, one of the rival
candidates, General “Big” Minh — who’d also been a player in the period between
November 1963 and June 1965 in which there were no fewer than eight South Viet
Namese governments — “Musical Governments,” Mad magazine called it — asked for
permission to leave the country, and instead was arrested. Some democracy.) The
elections were held largely to placate opposition both in South Viet Nam and
the U.S.; American critics of the war were wondering why we were being told we
were fighting for “democracy” when the local government we were allied with was
being run by military officers who’d taken power in coups, and Viet Namese
Buddhists (which was about nine-tenths of the country) were once again mounting
resistance actions and claiming that they were the victims of discrimination by
the Roman Catholic minority who were actually running the South Viet Namese
government and had been since the formation of the rump state of South Viet Nam
and the installation of its first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1955.

There is
no doubt in my mind that the war in Viet Nam was a misguided misadventure that
didn’t even make sense as an act of imperialism — Viet Nam had no resources to
speak of (about all that could be said for it in terms of its value in
international trade was it was a great place to grow rice), nor was it
strategically located in terms of confronting China (as Korea was), and any
value it could have had to the international capitalist ruling class was hardly
worth the toll in human lives, financial resources and overall national energy
the American elite put into it. It will be interesting to see how this series
develops — even though, in one of the dorkiest decisions any American
broadcasting network has ever made, they’re putting the series on pause for the
next few days and won’t resume it until this Sunday night (with “Things Fall
Apart,” the episode that will cover the Tet offensive); either way, the
conflicts that drove U.S. politics and society apart over Viet Nam — and the
other two big things that happened to America, politically and socially, in the
1960’s, the African-American civil rights struggle and the emergence of the
counterculture (which in the 1960’s meant the hippies and today mostly means
Queers) — still
divide the country, and Donald Trump’s election as President was in large
measure a triumph of the racist, pro-war and anti-counterculture movement that
emerged in the 1960’s on the American Right to support the war in Viet Nam and
drive — politically and, sometimes, physically — the war’s likely opponents out
of any influence in what went on in American governance and society.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Last night I once again watched the new episode of the Ken
Burns/Lynn Novick documentary The Viet Nam War (Ken Burns gets all the credit but the two are listed as co-directors
and Geoffrey C. Ward as writer, so it’s really a collaboration among the three
of them), which was called “Resolve.” That brought back memories: I’m sure it was the use of that word as a noun
during the Viet Nam war (as in, “We have to stay in Viet Nam because we must
show our resolve”) that has given me a lifelong allergy to the word “resolve”
as a noun. Usually, “we must show our resolve” means “we’re doing something
incredibly stupid and pointless and wasteful, but by gad, we’re going
to keep doing it!” Ironically, with this,
its fourth episode, the Viet Nam War
documentary is getting as repetitive as the Viet Nam war itself: a jumble of
odd names of people and places, a battle here, a protest there, a student
strike in South Viet Nam itself when a popular commander in the Army of the
Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) was fired by dictator Nguyen Cao “I have only one
hero — Hitler” Ky; he was also a Buddhist, and apparently Ky, like Ngo Dinh
Diem, was a Roman Catholic and was giving Catholics (who, remember, had adopted
the religion of Viet Nam’s former imperialist occupiers, the French)
preferential treatment in both the government and the military.

The open unrest
in the streets of South Viet Nam’s two major cities, Saigon and Hue, made it
even harder for the U.S. government and the war’s supporters to maintain the
fiction that we were fighting to protect the South Viet Namese people’s right
to “democracy” against the enslavement of Communism. (Historically, ironically
enough, there had not been two Viet Nams but three: the country had long been
divided into three provinces — Tonkin in the north, Annam in the center and
Cochin-China in the south — and interestingly, when Ho Chi Minh first appealed
for American aid after World War II he signed his letter not as the actual or would-be head of state of a united
Viet Nam but specifically as Annamese.) The period of the war covered by
“Resolve” was from January 1966 to June 1967, though it could have been just
about any time between the introduction of U.S. ground troops in January 1965
and the Tet offensives launched by the North Viet Namese army in February-March
1968 — the first time they had risked a major conventional offensive instead of
grinding the U.S. troops down in one guerrilla firefight after another. Tet went
badly for the North Vietnamese militarily — the U.S. and their nominal Viet
Namese allies were overwhelmed at first but quickly rallied and retook the
territory they had lost — but it was a smashing success for them politically:
it basically evaporated much of the support the U.S. population had previously
shown for the war and was the final factor in Lyndon Johnson’s determination to
bow out of the Presidency and abandon his 1968 re-election campaign. “Resolve”
is at its best on the occasions Burns and his team are able to cast Viet Nam as
the sort of war they had famously made films about before — the U.S. Civil War
and the American involvement in World War II — and one of the most interesting
points it made is that both the
U.S. officers and the actual servicemembers doing the fighting had been
conditioned in their expectations of what war was by World War II.

The
officers, including U.S. commanding general William Westmoreland (whose name I
can recall the peace movement caricaturing as “Waste-More-Land”), had come
through the ranks and had actually fought in World War II, and the grunt
soldiers — especially the ones who volunteered rather than waiting to get
drafted (Viet Nam was our last major conscript war and Burns and company really
don’t go into the dynamics of the draft and how it actually operated as they
should have — ironically, ending the draft has been one of those
be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-get-it moments for the American Left,
since having a so-called “volunteer army” has actually made it easier, not harder, for more recent U.S. governments to get
into and sustain endless wars, while the growing economic inequality of
American society and the drying-up of alternative opportunities for upward
mobility has meant that the “volunteers” of today’s U.S. military look a lot
like the draftees of the previous one: largely working-class or below, and with
a far greater concentration of people of color than the population as a whole)
— had been conditioned on what “war” was by the memories of their parents and
family members who had fought in World War II and how that war had been
depicted in movies and on TV. The closest thing so far in this film to a
typical “Ken Burns hero” — Denton “Mogie” Crocker, Jr. (his nickname came from
his having been such an assertive child his parents called him “our little
mogul”), a Midwestern boy (his mom and sister were interviewed for this show)
who was so determined to fight in the war that he ran away from home at 17 and
refused to return until his parents agreed to sign the exemption that would
allow him to enlist before 18 — gets honored here with Burns’ trademarked
sepulchral-voiced readings of his letters to his family back home (in which
actor Ben Rappoport “played” Mogie) as well as interviews with his survivors.
Once he went through basic training he was sent to Viet Nam, but at first he
was only given desk work counting the casualties — a job he deliberately
screwed up so he’d be fired and reassigned to do what he really wanted, which
was actually to fight. Only as he saw what war in general and this war in particular were really like, he began to get
disillusioned, and on June 23, 1966 (ironically, his 19th birthday),
he was killed when his unit was ambushed.

One of the quirkier points made in
the documentary was that since Viet Nam was basically a guerrilla war (even
when the North Viet Namese “regulars” were sent into the country to fight
alongside the National Liberation Front guerrillas, they still fought like guerrillas, luring their enemy into devastating
ambushes and then slipping into the mountains and blending in with the local
population), the usual metric by which commanders determine whether they are
winning or losing — how much territory they are holding versus how much the
enemy is holding — didn’t apply in Viet Nam. Instead Robert McNamara, who among
other bad habits he’d picked up from his long career in the private sector (at
Ford Motor Company, where he’d risen to president before taking the job as John
F. Kennedy’s, and then Lyndon Johnson’s, secretary of defense) was an obsession
with quantification and a sense that any problem could be reduced to a statistical analysis that would in turn
generate the “right” solution, decided that the metric for success would be how
many enemy fighters the U.S. killed. General Westmoreland regularly talked of
the “crossover point,” meaning the point at which the U.S. were killing more
North Viet Namese and National Liberation Front fighters than the other side
could replace — and in early 1967 he was claiming he’d actually achieved the
“crossover point” everywhere except in the northern end of South Viet Nam near
the demilitarized zone the 1954 Geneva Agreements had set up to divide the
country. As a number of people point out in the show, this emphasis on the
sheer number of “enemy” dead as the metric of success led to some pretty
distorted command decisions; not only did it mean that battlefield commanders,
in their reports to their superiors, counted just about everyone they killed as “NVA” or “VC” whether they had been
or not (which was also a convenient way to avoid criticism of killing civilians
as “collateral damage” — just define the “enemy” so broadly that civilian
deaths virtually ceased to exist), it also meant that in planning actual
operations, battlefield commanders deliberately chose tactics that would
maximize the body counts whether that made sense either in terms of human cost
or simple military effectiveness.

Another of the anecdotes concerned a young
Marine who was shocked that when the U.S. captured NLF fighters who presumably
had information as to where the enemy was waiting to ambush U.S. soldiers, they
took them in on armored personnel carriers, tied them up and just pushed them
off the carriers with no way to break their fall, resulting in a series of
cracked ribs and other injuries. The Marine, Ben Earhardt (who was interviewed
for the program and was the one who told this story), was about to protest when
the superior officer he was going to protest to said that the U.S. spotters who
had been responsible for detecting the ambushes had it in for these people
because they could have told them
where the ambushers were and didn’t, and if Earhardt spoke on their behalf
they’d beat him up. (I couldn’t
help but reflect, as I had also with regard to the counterproductiveness —
never mind the morality, or lack of same — of the tortures inflicted by U.S.
servicemembers on similarly detained “enemy fighters” in Iraq — of the lesson
British commander John Masterman wrote in The Double-Cross System, his marvelous book about the British success in
“turning” virtually the whole German espionage network in the U.K. during World
War II, that the most important thing a country fighting a war can do to ensure
its success is to treat its prisoners of war decently, respectfully and
humanely. Apparently the old you-catch-more-flies-with-honey-than-with-vinegar
principle had never occurred to those “spotters” — neither they nor the
officers above them got it through their thick heads that they stood a better chance
of “turning” the captives and finding where the NVA and NLF forces were by
treating them respectfully than by torturing them.)

One other point about
“Resolve” was the way in which, by counterpointing anti-war and pro-war
demonstrations in the U.S., it showed how the division of the American
population into two strongly opposed camps and the resulting “polarization” of
American politics really had its roots in Viet Nam (though I would argue that
it was also due to the success of the African-American civil rights movement,
which had the unforeseen consequence of dividing white America and giving the
Republican Party and the U.S. Right in general the wedge through which they
finally destroyed the New Deal coalition and made working-class whites a
bulwark of the Republican Party
by appealing to their racism and cultural prejudices). We’re still living in
the America that was created in the 1960’s by the galvanic shocks of the civil
rights movement and the Viet Nam war, and despite a few reversals, the Right is
winning that racial and cultural war. Richard Nixon would win the White House
through allying with white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and practicing the
“Southern Strategy” that essentially flipped the two major U.S. political
parties’ traditional positions on civil rights — the Democrats, once the party
of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became the party of civil rights,
and the Republicans, the “Party of Lincoln,” re-invented themselves as the
party of racism and white supremacy — and though the Watergate scandal (which
was merely the tip of the iceberg of an elaborate plan by Nixon and his
campaign people to rig the 1972 election so he would not only win, but win in
such a devastating way it would end all challenges to his legitimacy) temporarily
derailed the Right-wing revolution in the U.S., it finally came to power under
Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, even more forcefully and transformationally, under
Donald Trump in 2016.